Signs and Signifiers
August 4
10:45 a.m.
Good morning! Sunday is just-begun, and I've already crossed a couple of items off my to-do list, which is nice. Yesterday was a pleasure-day; I didn't do anything even resembling work. I'll tell you about that, but I suppose I'll begin with Friday:
A very pleasant day at work, all-in-all, mostly because I didn't spend much time at work. I drove my boss around, running errands, for most of the day. He treated me to a big lunch . Ribs -- mmm. I don't have many opportunities to talk with my boss, but we did Friday, and it was good; he offered to read the beginning of my novel and give me advice, and he talked with me about finding an agent, and told me what to expect from Worldcon.
Friday night Heather went with me to the café, where I had a glass of wine and endeavored to unwind from a day of driving around; driving makes me tense. I read for a while, and then Heather and I did round-robin poetry for a bit, her writing two lines, me writing two lines. It was fun, and the result was interesting, though not really publishable. After that, I fetched us food from the Smokehouse, and we watched bad television and snuggled and all was well.
Yesterday, Saturday, was marvelous. Heather drove us to Berkeley, and then we went our separate ways, she to get her hair cut, me to wander. I bought the 2nd volume of Transmetropolitan, and Pratchett's Feet of Clay (for Heather), and the new F&SF (also for Heather, because she wanted to read Greg's story), then went to Au Coquelet and read. Heather joined me later, with her hair now shoulder-length (and very cute). We sat for a bit, then went to see a matinee of Signs (which I'll discuss at the end of this entry, in an asterisk-partitioned section, because my comments will be spoiler-filled, and I don't want to give anything away to anyone who doesn't want to know). After Signs, we checked the mail -- and found gifts! One of our readers sent us: fast, stylish scooter wheels; coffee; chocolates; nuts; and cash, to provide us with a sushi dinner. So nice! Whee! We sat on the Post Office steps and ate chocolates and sang "La la la" (well, metaphorically sang "La la la," anyway).
Heather wasn't hungry enough to go immediately for sushi, but I was starving (having eaten nothing all day but a few of Heather's breakfast-pizza crusts and the aforementioned chocolates), so we went to Jupiter and sat in the courtyard. It was overcast and cool, but not cold, so the outdoor seating was pleasant. I had a yummy porter, and we split some garlic-cheese bread, which filled my growling tummy. We read for a while, and sipped our beers, then went home and (rather inadvertently) took naps; I fell asleep on the couch, Heather fell asleep reading in bed. We woke around 9, shook the sleep out of our heads, and went to Drunken Fish, the new(ish) sushi place over on Auto Row. It was basically deserted, which is troubling, because they have good, relatively cheap sushi, and I want them to stay in business! We ate, and talked about writing and stories and the usefulness of criticism. So nice! And the caterpillar rolls were absolutely to die for. I love avocado. We came home and watched Groove, a movie about a rave, set in San Francisco (so we got to shout "Hey, we live near there!" fairly often). It was a far better movie than I'd expected -- Heather had wanted to see it because she knows a guy who worked on the film, and I was prepared for a bad-indie-movie experience, but it was fairly deft and high-energy and a lot of fun.
11:30 p.m.
More items fall from my list, victim of my slashing pen of marking-things-out!
I read (and wrote a blurb for) a novella by an editor who's published some of my work; I can't say who, because it's a pseudonymous story... but it's a good piece, far-future, far-flung SF, not my normal sort of pleasure reading, but interesting. I paid rent. I did laundry.
I tried to write, and oh, I failed. Tried to write poetry, and it sucked terribly; tried to write a short story; tried to work on my book; but it just didn't happen, writing was unbearable. That seldom happens to me, but when it does, it's a sign that I should just back off and take it easy and try again tomorrow. If I push, I develop negative associations with whatever I'm trying to work on, and that's no good. So, though I wrote a few hundred words of frustrated crap, I'm leaving the word-counter on zero; if I count frustrated crap, then I might as well count these journal entries, or e-mail I send, and you gotta draw the line somewhere... Maybe I'll get more work done this week. One hopes.
I was pretty stunningly unproductive overall this weekend, actually... I have galleys I haven't proofed, and poems I haven't sent out... ah, well. That's the way it goes sometimes. I had a very nice weekend, and I have to let myself have fun sometimes without the massive overpowering heart-crushing guilt, right?
Hmm. I had some things I was going to link to, and a couple of pictures I was going to put up, but with my ranting about Signs this is becoming a looong entry, so I'll call it finished, for now, and talk about that other stuff tomorrow.
Now, for Signs. (Spoilers ahead!)
I liked it! I was almost certain I would, because I've liked M. Night Shyamalan's other movies so much, and the things I liked were intrinsic to his writing and direction. There are some absolutely amazing lines in the movie, pitch-perfect moments of dialogue, and the acting is overall pretty good; Shyamalan has a gift for giving all his actors opportunities to shine. The young Culkin kid did fine, but the little girl, Abigail Breslin, absolutely stole the show. She was fabulous.
The plot is well made, slow-moving and suspenseful, and the ending is less a twist and more a falling-into-place of disparate elements into a suddenly coherent whole -- something I see quite often in novels, but very seldom in movies, so I was pleased.
There are some things I love because Shyamalan didn't do them; so many clichés avoided and expectations subverted. The one that comes most obviously to mind is the fact that Mel Gibson, the rural farmer, doesn't have a gun (or if he does, he doesn't load it and start shooting at the aliens (yeah, there are aliens; see, that's a spoiler)). I found myself waiting for the moment when the beleagured family would arm themselves with shotguns, and it never came, though it surely would have in any other movie with such a set-up. Another thing I loved: despite the fact that there were aliens in their town, the characters got most of their information from television, and in fact their first more-or-less clear glimpse of an alien was on television, footage from a videotape taken at a Brazilian birthday party! I think that's the way it would be, too -- we would experience an alien invasion primarily through television, at least in the early stages. There's a moment where Joachim Phoenix says "It's like War of the Worlds," but the great thing is, it's not -- if there's mass hysteria, we don't see it, because the film has a very personal, close focus, on this one family. There are no war machines and no death rays -- even the way the aliens attack people is one-on-one, up-close, personal. It is, in every way, the anti-Independence Day (and I can think of no higher compliment, though I think that'll alienate a lot of viewers -- the people I overheard talking about the movie after we left the theater seemed annoyed that it expected a degree of thought and attention from them, which reminded me why I'm in some ways basically misanthropic). The aliens' motivations are never explained, which is wonderful -- because they're alien! They're doing weird stuff, and we don't know why! People theorize, but nothing is ever pinned-down. My favorite facet of the movie was the distinctly non-Hollywood way the aliens were presented. For once, a major studio movie has managed to catch up with literary science fiction. Hurray!
Though the emphasis is really on horror and suspense, not science fiction; the aliens could just as easily have been demons or evil spirits, and the plot would have worked as well. Better, in fact, at the end -- because one of the moments where my suspension of disbelief failed utterly was when the aliens proved vulnerable to... da dum... water! Yes, that's right; splash water on them, and they fizz and bubble and scream. (Which led me to ask Heather "What, are they a sodium-based life-form?") This effect has many a filmic antecedent, of course, from the Wicked Witch of the West melting, to countless movie vampires sizzling when struck by holy water (and hey, Mel Gibson's character was a reverend...), but it doesn't make much sense if you try to look at the movie as true science fiction. Why the hell would water kill them? So: pretend they're monsters, which is what they're used for, really. Ah. Now it's okay.
Hmm. Bruce Willis's character in Unbreakable was vulnerable to water, too. That's odd. What's Shyamalan got against the universal solvent? I think there's a master's thesis in there somewhere...
My only real complaint about the movie is a philosophical one, and it's not about anything Shyamalan did wrong; I have this problem with lots of fantasy. One of the central questions of the film is, basically, whether or not there's a god. Mel Gibson plays a reverend who loses his faith after his wife dies in a pretty gruesome, senseless way, and he expresses the sentiment that "We're all alone, there's no one up there looking out for us." Which I think is true -- to paraphrase Tom Tomorrow, I don't believe in magical omnipotent superheroes who live in outer space. But by the end of the movie (of course), it becomes apparent that there is a god, that there are no accidents, that everything happens for a reason, etc. Very disappointing. I would have much preferred for Mel Gibson's character to realize "Hey, we're not alone in the universe -- sure, there's no god, but I've got my family, my brother and my kids, and together, we can get through this." That's a good lesson -- much better than "My wife died horribly and my daughter is obsessive-compulsive and my brother failed in his baseball career and my son has life-threatening asthma, but that's okay, because god wanted it that way, and if any of those bad things hadn't happened, the aliens would've kicked our asses!" Which is literally true; all this more-or-less terrible stuff that happens to the characters becomes absolutely integral to their defeating the aliens, and the reason it all falls into place so neatly, we're told, is because "there are no coincidences" -- everything happens for a reason.
Which suggests a god who built the universe like a Rube Goldberg machine -- or one who just likes to set up elaborate domino formations with human lives, and then enjoy the pretty patterns when you start knocking the dominoes over. Shudder. So I disagree strenuously with the fundamental philosophical underpinning of the film, but I still enjoyed it -- and, heck, I can just tell myself the movie was set in an alternate universe where there is an infantile, game-playing god, and that's just one more speculative element, and then it's okay, right?
Words written since February 1, 2002: 128,450
Words written since last entry: I need underground comix.
Tim Pratt Read about my current publications.
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